Users of data processing systems may require access to data contained within multiple document servers. For example, a financial institution may desire to review various types of documents related to a customer, such as checking account records, credit reports, credit card records, and income tax records. Conventionally, similar documents, or documents created with a particular application program, are maintained in respective document servers. Each document server conventionally requires a user interface specific to that document server for enabling end users to retrieve and display documents therefrom. For example, a user desiring a document from document server "A" activates a user interface specifically designed to query document server "A". Utilizing this user interface, an end user performs a query to retrieve the document.
It would be desirable to be able to search for documents contained within multiple document servers using a single, common user interface. Unfortunately, protocols for some document servers may be incompatible with the protocols for other document servers so that cross-searching with a single interface may not be possible, or may be difficult to perform. For example, similar data fields may have different locations within similar records of the same or different document servers. Additionally, similar data fields may contain different data types. Various other differences may exist as well, such as field length. Furthermore, document servers may run under different operating systems. For example, legacy financial information systems may run on mainframe computing systems, while credit report information systems may run on document servers utilizing the Windows NT.RTM. operating system.
Conventionally, each document server queried by an end user requires a separate client session on the end user's client machine. This is illustrated schematically in FIG. 1, wherein a client machine contains two active client sessions (client sessions 1 and 2) corresponding with respective document servers A and B. It would be desirable to simplify user access to data contained within multiple document servers by allowing document retrieval and display without requiring separate client sessions in order to search and retrieve documents from each document server.